Heredity, Race, and the Birth of the Modern / Edition 1

by Sara Eigen Figal

Overview

This book places under sustained scrutiny some of our most basic modern assumptions about inheritance, genealogy, blood relations, and racial categories. It has at its core a deceptively simple question, one too often taken for granted: what constitutes "good" bonds among humans, and what compels us to determine them so across generations as both a physical and a metaphysical attribute? Answering this question is complex and involves a foray into a seemingly disparate array of early modern sources: from adages, common law, and literature about bloodlines and bastardy to philosophical, political, and scientific discourses that both confirm and confound the "common sense" of familial, communal, national, and racial identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415964791
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/14/2008
Series:	Studies in Philosophy
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sara Eigen Figal is on the faculty of the German Department at Vanderbilt University. She is co-editor (with Mark Larrimore) of The German Invention of Race, a collection of essays on eighteenth-century science, philosophy, political theory, and literature, published with SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Generating the Good

Chapter One: Legal Fictions of Genealogy

Chapter Two: Mothers Have Animals, Fathers Have Heirs

Chapter Three: Questions of Kind: A Human Species

Chapter Four: Questions of Kind: (family) Race (species)

Chapter Five: Genealogical Purification

Chapter Six: Medical Police and Hybridization

Chapter Seven: Literary Insight: Brotherhood, the End of Tolerance

Postscript: Heredity’s Time

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book offers a great deal of valuable research and discussion material." — L.L. Lovern, Valdosta State University

From the Publisher